A Time of Magic » House Improvements

Getting closer to that new kitchen

admin — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 22:24:39 +0000

It’s been quite a journey but we’re now close enough to seeing the kitchen upgrade being done that we’re beginning to look at things like le creuset to complement what should be quite a modernisation of the house.

Funnily enough, the cookware is one of the areas people neglect yet it seems daft to spend thousand on a new kitchen and continue to use the old pots and pans, doesn’t it?

Fingers crossed, we’ll be out shopping soon.

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Minor redecorating for a major facelift

admin — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 11:05:32 +0000

Often it’s the little things that make the largest difference to how a home looks and feels.

So, for example, replacing cheap plant stands with more upmarket ones can make a major difference to how a home looks without a major amount of expenditure. Usually just as cheap but obviously requiring a bit more work is a change of colour scheme.

What you need to do is to have a clear idea in mind of the look that you’re aiming for as that’ll make it easy to select the minor items as you walk around a shop and know that they’ll fit in with your overall plan.

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Just starting the house upgrade so mess is everywhere

admin — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 23:03:22 +0000

The problem when you’re trying to upgrade the appearance of your house in a lot of ways is that everywhere you look, everything looks awful.

So we’re in the midst of trying to work out whether or not to get Kichler lighting whilst the new settees are arriving in the morning. Next up, hopefully, is the kitchen upgrade which we’d really like to get done before Christmas but with our luck it will be happening right over Christmas.

In parallel with that we’re aiming to do something major with the bathroom too… ’tis all go, or rather not at the moment.

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Getting the kitchen refloored

admin — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:29:18 +0000

Between one thing and another, we’re almost ready to see about getting the house sorted out in terms of the bathroom and kitchen and have been window shopping amongst an assortment of shops.

That’s turned up some amazing bargains in things like pergo flooring and even more fantastic “entire house” flooring which apparently can be done for less than we’d been budgeting for a single room. Actually, that particular offer has thrown the plans up in the air somewhat as we were planning on doing things gradually rather than in one big move.

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Just what DO you store chemical stuff in?

admin — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 20:44:32 +0000

When you’ve been in a house for a while, you accumulate things.

Whilst it’s not so bad for household items, when you start trying to collect things together in the garage you really need to start considering things like stainless steel drums to avoid all the problems that chemicals can cause very easily.

Of course, once you’ve everything in those drums you may well have the problem that you’ve nowhere left to park the car…

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Valuing a house when it’s not a cookie-cutter one

admin — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 07:10:45 +0000

We’re trying to sell a rather unique property at the moment.

That’s clearly more difficult in the current market than it would have been a few years ago and therefore the buyers are that little bit more cautious about it. Essentially they want to know what the property is really worth when previously they’d have taken more of a chance.

Thus, we find ourselves becoming more aware of what it’s really worth as opposed to what we’d like it to be worth. As it happens there isn’t a whole lot of difference in the two figures and we’ve been keeping such a close eye on it that when we got another valuation done by an estate agent to help one of the buyers our own figure was identical to the one that we’d quoted that buyer earlier (no, we didn’t influence the agent: the buyer arranged the agents visit and we never even spoke to them).

The problem is that this particular buyer had started from the premise that he could borrow X, that he’d need to spend Y on various renovations and that therefore he could only pay us X-Y. Unfortunately, that figure is well under what we could accept as even a rock bottom minimum and it turns out it about a third of what the valuation turned up. To say that he’s not a happy bunny is putting it mildly as he’d put quite a bit of time, effort and money into getting all kinds of experts out to assess what it would cost to makeover the property into what he wants and now that’s all been wasted.

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Will we ever get that new bathroom?

admin — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 06:42:49 +0000

It seems like forever that we’ve been intending to get the bathroom updated but we’ve been just too swamped with other things lately to make much progress with it in the last month or two.

We’re actually almost at the stage of getting the builders in for the final quote but need to tidy up a few loose ends so that they can finalise the quote and get started on the work. The problem is that at this stage you start thinking about things like a Toto toilet and thus get yourself diverted into considering a slightly different look than we’d originally started with.

I think we just need to sit down, go through the catalogue and list everything now!

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The trivial amongst the major house improvements

admin — Tue, 04 May 2010 08:09:57 +0000

Everyone generally concentrates on the major house improvements like the new conservatory or the like.

However, there are a number of equally impressive smaller improvements that you can make too. These range from simple slipcovers through to decorating (which can almost equate to a major house improvement). In the middle ground are easy upgrades like adding a nice set of garden furniture for the summer or simply redoing the arrangements of plants in your garden to create a totally new look.

These don’t need to be expensive improvements either. Whilst you can certainly look towards expensive furniture shops for your garden furniture, often you can find ranges that are just as impressive by looking through a DIY store (garden shops tend to be on the expensive side).

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Choosing the new bathroom

admin — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 12:25:45 +0000

We’re in the process of a forced upgrade to our bathroom which is a bit of a nuisance really.

It does have the advantage that we are getting to go through a major update of the bathroom which definitely needed one. So far, we’ve the choices out with the builder who’ll be coming back with a quote for the work after Easter.

Next up is the kitchen where we also have effectively a forced update on our hands too. That’s at an earlier stage so we’ve not even looked at kitchen faucets as yet but we did have a bit of a glance at some things whilst choosing things for the bathroom.

Now, “all” we need to do is get the money for it all

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How come almost everything seems to be going down in price?

admin — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 17:43:26 +0000

We all know that electronic things have been going down in price for a long time and that house prices have been going down for a year or two but what about everything else?

You might not think of books as something that would go down. After all, they need authors to write them and their salaries aren’t going down, plus they need seemingly perpetually increasing amounts of paper to print them on. Yet, whilst way back in 1981 the Encyclopaedia Britannica retailed for Â£600, you can buy the latest one (if you look around) for Â£450.

Houses might be dropping in price but surely house improvements would be more expensive? Well, we’re in the process of updating our kitchen and bathroom. Both are around the same price as the original cost some 30 years ago. And the new one will be much higher quality too.

It seems almost a case of looking around for things that aren’t decreasing in price.

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